From the course: Navisworks Essential Training 2023

Selecting objects - Navisworks Tutorial

From the course: Navisworks Essential Training 2023

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Selecting objects

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- [Instructor] Okay, it's time to actually touch something. The idea going around of not being able to actually modify something in Navisworks is not entirely true. You really can modify items in Navisworks. The issue is you need to be able to select these items first. This video will cover three ways to select an object. The first will be while in navigation mode. The second is to select singular items. The third is to select multiple items using a window. We'll also be introduced to the selection tree and see how we can change the control of the display when an object is selected. And third, we'll look at some options to see when we're hovering over an item. We can see what kind of properties will be displayed. So let's jump into Navisworks. And of course, I'm going to open my NavisworksEssential.nwd file. Click open. What I'd like to do is click on my little feet here for my walk. Now I'm going to move forward and I'm going to walk over to this area here. Hold down my wheel button, kind of panned down to this area. Walk in on it a little bit more. And here we go. Now because we're in navigation mode, we can't really select anything. If we right click on an object, notice, we can select something. Notice it says Select Resolution to first object. We had changed that in the properties a few videos back. But if we come all the way up here, we can go to Select Pipe Cover. Now notice with this item selected, with our properties turned on, we can widen that. We can see everything about that element. Now what we can do to select two items is hit escape and actually click the select button on the home tab. So click select. Now if you hit the Control key, you can select one item, two item, or any items that you want to select. So that's kind of cool. If you click off of it, it'll deselect those items and probably select something that you picked before. But if you select off of it in an open area, you won't select anything else. One other thing we can do is we can pick a window around objects. So if I go to my select icon and hit the dropdown here and go to Select Box, I can pretty much pick a window and everything that's 100% inside of that box will become selected. Now if we want to add to that selection set, we hold down the Control key. We can either pick another window or we can click the select dropdown and go select, hold down the Control key and just select any additional items we want added to that selection set. Hit escape a couple times. And the next thing I want to look at is the selection tree. On the Home tab, make sure selection tree is picked. Now over here, if we hover over our selection tree, it will fly out. If we click on the pin button, that'll auto hide that selection tree. Let's click the pin again, or the auto hide button. Hover over selection tree. There she is. Now, if we drill into the selection tree, notice that it's broken down into the models that we have in here. Drill into it. Now, architecture is based on level and that is the standard selection tree. Go ahead and hit the dropdown and go to Compact. Now go ahead and right click on an object. And notice that it says Select 401 Roof. It said something different before. It wanted to select that cover. That is because in the selection tree itself, and we have it broken down based on where those items are going to be at. You can also go to properties. This really drills in tight, and we will look at searching on properties in a later video. But for the selection tree, I like to go to standard. Notice that when we select one of these items, everything becomes selected in the selection tree, which is pretty cool. Hit escape a couple times. Now another thing I'd like to show you is if we hover over an item, it'd be kind of cool to see what that item says. If we go to the home tab, notice that we have a properties icon. Just above it, we have a quick properties icon. Go ahead and select that. Know if I hover over an item, notice that we get element ID, pipe cover, mechanical equipment, pipe cover. It's pretty cool. We go to options. If we come down to quick properties and drill into that, we'll see definitions. The quick properties when we hover over something and I actually like the category element ID to be the property value, category name, and then item type. So that gave us three different items that we were able to look at. And this again is a setting that we changed earlier but you can change these, add 'em, remove 'em as you see fit. Click OK. Hit Escape a couple times and that's it. That's how you select items in Navisworks.

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